Review Summary

More bump-in-the-night than blood-on-the-ground, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” is an old-fashioned spooker suggesting that dysfunctional families might benefit more from malignant demons than from a benign therapist. Set in the kind of crumbling mansion that invariably comes with a loon-haunted lake and a gruff handyman who knows more than he’s letting on, this handsome throwback follows a lonely child, Sally (Bailee Madison), whose distracted father (Guy Pearce, bored to tears) plans to renovate the home under the direction of his considerably younger girlfriend (Katie Holmes). Unbeknownst to this tense little family, the former tenants are still in residence: tiny, toothy creatures who whisper in the walls and scrabble in the skirting, occasionally poking a miniature claw in the direction of a human body part. What they’re after is clear from the film’s gruesome prologue; what they look like is withheld until long after we have ceased to care. Reimagining the 1973 television movie that terrified him as a boy, the producer, Guillermo del Toro — who wrote the screenplay with Matthew Robbins and who has made a career transforming childhood trauma into art house shivers — may have entrusted directing duties to Troy Nixey, but his fingerprints are all over the screen. — Jeannette Catsoulis